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Kingsley Kwame Awuah-Darko, a former Managing Director (MD) of the Tema Oil Refinery (TOR), has said he never paid as the MD for the TOR.
According to him, because he was also the MD for the Bulk Oil Storage and Transportation Co Ltd (BOST), he was only being paid for his services at BOST and not TOR.
“I was given additional responsibility as the MD for the TOR so I wasn’t even drawing two salaries; I was only drawing one salary from BOST. I never took a penny from TOR,” he told Bernard Avle on Citi TV, Wednesday evening.
He said that during his time at TOR, he together with his team were able to turn things around at the Refinery, a reason he wore white together with his staff to praise God for it.
“The reality is that, when I got to TOR, we had no Refinery activity going on. The Tank farm was overgrown and we had snakes, stray dogs and stray cats; if you sent a worker to go into the Tank farm, they would refuse to go. We couldn’t pay for electricity and our lights were being shut off all the time.
“Things were so bad that the workers of TOR gave up their salaries for two months to enable us to put the company’s finances in the short term together. That’s the TOR I went to meet. The TOR I left had gone from 25,000 barrels a day to 45,000 barrels a day,” he added.
Awuah-Darko added that TOR was able to pay off 350 million out of the 650 million TOR debt he inherited as an MD and before he left the Refinery, it had started processing TEN crude oil.
In explaining how he was able to turn things around at TOR, Kwame Awuah-Darko said, when he was given the mandate as the MD in July 2015, he used six months to get the mindset of the workers and refocus the Refinery with a massive organizational restructuring.
He continued: “We started refining on February 4, 2016. We had a module where TOR was tolling crude oil for BOST and as a result, TOR was not engaging in the commercial operation in the crude oil trading. It only focused on processing. TOR was making 4.5 dollars every barrel and we tolled seven million barrels. That was [a] nice clean income with no price fluctuation or exposure to TOR. If you look at that, it was the first time, that TOR had stable income for a period.”
